User Generated Content (UGC) refers to the contents which have been generated and posted or posted to the public by a user on the Internet. At present, such contents may be in the form of text, videos and audio contents, and posted through micro-blogs, comments, logs, photos, music and videos which have been posted in various social networks worldwide and in various countries. Some of those better known social networks may include, but not limited to Facebook, Twitter, Fanbox, Google share, Myspace, Youtube, Yelp, Qzone, Weibo, Weiboke, just to name a few.
Along with the development of technologies in high speed internet networks, availability of mass memory storage with database management and user friendly procedure to post content on the social network website, UGC has become a popular tool to connect and communicate with the mass population worldwide. The volume of UGC posted on the internet has sharply increased.
At present, the default practice in the industry in terms of how to display UGC is: displaying a list of UGC according to chronological order—the posting time in a journal or archive format.
Take micro-blog as an example: micro-blogs that need to be displayed may first be formed into a list of micro-blogs with the latest or most recent posted micro-blog being placed on the top, and the earliest posted microblog being arranged at the bottom. Besides, the micro-blogs that need to be displayed have to be displayed through displaying the list of micro-blogs first, which may include all the micro-blogs posted in proximal to the current position of the user.
In addition, the present method of searching through UGC seems to start with searching from the most recent display on the list of UGC at a display interface, which may not be of immediate interest to the user. In this regard, the method of displaying the UGC affects how the UGC is being searched. Accordingly, the present display method does not provide a sufficiently direct way to search and view the contents of interest, such as graphics content, posting time or posting location, etc. Instead, the search of the UGC needs to be performed by way of reading one by one down the list, which is somewhat inefficient and slow.